it

dxdiag

Lenovo E880779B (laptop)
XP 5.1
Gemini I/II
Celeron 1.50GHZ
478MB Ram

What's the best thing I can do to get this thing running faster and

I have a SiS M661MX 32MB graphic card which I assume is on the motherboard, do I have slots to add a new graphic card? And how do I check, many thanks

mayap

United States185 Posts

September 24 2007 22:20 GMT

you need to be more specific then "whats the best thing i can do", the reason why ur comp is slow now is cus of spyware and downloads etc. so the best thing u can do if you dont wanna get any money involved in this is too reinstall windows and just save your important files on another drive, you can also get some antivirus scanners reformat ur disc etc

Texas

Germany2388 Posts

September 24 2007 22:20 GMT

more ram will surely help, 512mb isnt that much
graphic card is extremely crappy, does wc3 run on this pc?

oneofthem

Cayman Islands24199 Posts

September 24 2007 22:23 GMT

the ram is 'decent' enough to run things not from norton, adobe and microsoft. the cpu i assume is hte bottleneck, but it could also be the harddrive. the bigger problem is, what programs are running. it most probably is getting bogged down by too many shit running in the background.

and it is a laptop, everything not harddrive and memory should be set in stone. dont think about upgrading stuff.

zulu_nation8

China26351 Posts

September 24 2007 22:26 GMT

should be the norton I think, oh well at least I can add memory, with the same graphic card I can forget about playing anything made after 2004

chiflutz

Romania1025 Posts

September 24 2007 22:27 GMT

First thing's first. To find more info about your computer get Aida32.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/AIDA.shtml

Tells you a bunch more stuff than dxdiag (altho dxdiag's report feature is quite good, just that aida presents things in a more organised fashion).
Next, your graphics card is using something that would be called HyperMemory nowadays, for marketing purposes, which means it shares RAM with the system, and effectively has no dedicated memory of its own.
Personally, I think anything beyond adding more RAM, a system tune-up and/or OS reinstall is overkill. You're better off buying a new computer since, even if you have an AGP slot (never heard of Gemini, but laptops aren't my specialty), it's gonna cost a bunch to have a new graphics card installed.
If you plan on keeping it, check with Aida for available DIMM/PCI/AGP slots. Getting another 512 megs of RAM will probably boost its life expectancy considerably (tho not *that* much).

Hope this helps.

jtan

Sweden5891 Posts

September 24 2007 22:35 GMT

Formatting and reinstalling helps in case you have a lot of processes running.

Switching to some linux OS speeds it up too, but since you have a pretty good machine I guess you want to play some games on it.

vstar

Korea (South)693 Posts

September 24 2007 22:45 GMT

From the looks of it, definitely upgrade more RAM

Jonoman92

United States9111 Posts

September 24 2007 22:49 GMT

On September 25 2007 07:26 zulu_nation8 wrote:
should be the norton I think, oh well at least I can add memory, with the same graphic card I can forget about playing anything made after 2004

SC was made in 1998..... so you're fine.

oneofthem

Cayman Islands24199 Posts

September 24 2007 22:57 GMT

#10

yea kill norton. it is shit

Lycaeus

United States1420 Posts

September 24 2007 23:03 GMT

#11

yea your ram looks to be a bit low, try downloading some more if you can

BluzMan

Russian Federation4235 Posts

September 25 2007 00:38 GMT

#12

SC will run on it, but the bottleneck of your system is the graphics card and memory. Windows XP will eat most of both. Try to find the specs of your laptop over the net, but an embedded graphics is most likely impossible to upgrade. I'd say get a new one, they've become somewhat cheap.

Another nice option will be to downgrade Windows but I have rarely tried it and older versions will require some skill to set up.

backdrOp

United States104 Posts

September 25 2007 04:24 GMT

#13

this is what i found works best for me

Windows XP Pro, not Home Edition
Use Ad-Aware, Spybot : adware/spyware removal
Regseeker, CCleaner : fix registry problems
and a Defragmenter (I've used Ultimate Defrag, Diskeeper, currently using Perfect Disk)

XP pro because it uses the least amount of resources
Defrag so programs start up efficiently

also: one of the major things is having an anti-virus program. if you have those programs that actively search for viruses, these slow down your computer a lot, esp. if it's an old one. you don't have to worry about viruses unless you misclick a lot, or someone is motivated to get at you. for me these are rare, so i don't bother with them. at the most i use AVG everyone once in a while, or when i open something that i suspect is a virus. hope this helps

if anyone knows anything helpful, i'm curious as well

haduken

Australia8267 Posts

September 25 2007 07:23 GMT

#14

defrag your windows partition if you haven't done so. the best you can probably do right now, i'm sorry your laptop is just too old...